The Future Is Present

The Future Is Present

Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image

About the Book

A critical history of the pioneering art and technology group Mobile Image and their prescient work in communications, networking, and information systems.

In The Future Is Present, Philip Glahn and Cary Levine tell the fascinating history of the visionary art group Mobile Image—founded by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in 1977—which appropriated emerging technologies, from satellites to electronic message platforms. Based in Los Angeles, this under-studied collective worked amid urban crisis, a techno-boom, consolidating media power, and ascendant neoliberal politics. Mobile Image challenged fundamental conventions of the public sphere, democracy, communication, and political participation, as well as notions of power, representation, and identity.

Glahn and Levine argue not only for the historical importance of Mobile Image, but also for a critical artistic process that is at once analytic and transformative. They weave themes such as embodiment and its mediation, public/private dialectics, and techno-utopian vision throughout the book, binding these projects to discourses around race, gender, and class, as well as margin and center, the local and the global. In today’s world of ubiquitous digital re/production, networking, and social media, The Future Is Present shows how the work of Mobile Image continues to have profound implications for art, technology, and the politics of public and private experience.
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Leonardo Series

The Cory Arcangel Hack
Proxistant Vision
Social Media Archeology and Poetics
Ecologies of Artistic Practice
Heartbeat Art
Voicetracks
Virtual Menageries
Control
Living Surfaces
The Future Is Present
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About the Author

Philip Glahn
Decorative Carat

About the Author

Cary Levine
Decorative Carat

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